1. AOTW: Once again, I am going to have to go with people who apparently were absent in their driver education class the day the teacher explained how to use an automatic turn signal. It's almost an epidemic around here, this not signaling. I'm old enough that we still learned hand signals in our class (that's right: left arm out the window to let drivers know if you were going left, right, or stopping--image below shows what we learned--and had to show our teacher). I really don't get this new "thing" of not signaling ... are people just too distracted? Or stupid? Or just, fundamentally, AOTWs?
2. I finished just one book this week, the first novel by Ocean Vuong, a young man who has been making his name as a poet--and now as a novelist. One of his poems, "Torso of Air," appeared in the New York Times Magazine on June 24, 2016, and I liked it so much I memorized it:
Torso of Air
Suppose you
do change your life.
& the
body is more than
a portion of
night — sealed
with
bruises. Suppose you woke
& found
your shadow replaced
by a black
wolf. The boy, beautiful
& gone.
So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You
carve & carve
until a coin
of light appears
& you
get to look in, at last,
on
happiness. The eye
staring back
from the other side —
waiting.
An immigrant from Vietnam, Vuong has a gripping command of the English language--as the poem illustrates and as the novel demonstrates even more clearly. That novel--On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)--is (sort of) a letter to the narrator's mother. There are passages of fairly traditional narrative, but throughout there are also very lyrical and even poetic sections. One, for example, begins like this:
Trevor rusted pickup and no license.
Trevor sixteen; blue jeans streaked with deer blood.
Trevor too fast and not enough.
Trevor waving his John Deere cap from the driveway as you ride by on your squeaky Schwinn.
Our narrator has realized that he is gay, and Trevor is his first sexual partner. (There are some fairly graphic moments here.) Trevor is also not particularly happy about this--though is genuinely fond of the narrator, and there is one touching scene when Trevor helps him clean up after a sexual encounter.
Well, I don't want to give away much more. Some dark things happen before all is over.
I wanted to like the novel more than I did. I don't know--it just seemed a little self-conscious to me? At times, trying too hard to impress?
But Vuong is clearly a talent. I'll keep buying his books--prose and poetry--for a while.
3. Last night, Joyce and I drove over to the Cinemark in Cuyahoga Falls to see the new Quentin Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which we both liked--a lot. The plot--set in 1969--is about the diminishing career of the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who was a big
DiCaprio lives next to a house rented by Roman Polanski, who is living there with his latest gf, actress Sharon Tate. (See where this is headed?)
Anyway, the two stories run in parallel for a while, and then, on a famous night, they intersect. 'Nuff said.
The detail in the film is astonishing. 1969 (which, by the way, is the year Joyce and I met) comes alive in ways that folks who weren't living then will have a hard time grasping, I think. The movie titles on the theater marquees, the music, the clothing styles, the haircuts, the slang, and on and on an on--the details swept both of us back to that time (though, of course, we were living in Kent, Ohio, not Hollywood!).
The film is also populated with characters from the period--actors, directors. And, as is his wont, Tarantino invited into his cast a number of veterans--Bruce Dern, Luke Perry, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Michael Madsen, etc.
There are some lovely and long lingering scenes. On a set, for example, DiCaprio has a long conversation with an 8-yr-old girl (who's also in the cast of the film he's in), and she teaches him a few things about acting--and dedication. (Later, she returns for a very moving moment.)
There are also long takes from films and TV shows he has shot and from the one he is shooting. There's even a what-if? moment: What if he'd gotten the Steve McQueen role in The Great Escape?
I see Tarantino has taken some critical shots because the film is basically about white males, etc. Okay. But he's also created a layered, at times ironic, and powerful film (with a very strong cast) that yanks us back fifty years to see a world that, in some ways, is as ancient and distant as Thebes. And in some ways as relevant as tomorrow.
Link to some video.
4. Final Word--A word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers:
- from wordsmith.org
teknonymy or teknonymy (tek-NON-uh-mee)
noun: The custom of naming a parent after their child.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek teknon (child) + -onym (name).
Earliest documented use: 1888.
NOTES: If you have ever called your spouse Billy’s Dad or Billy’s Mom,
you have practiced teknonymy. When we refer to a parent as a senior, as in Bush
Sr. (or, to get fancy, Bush père), we are also doing a kind of teknonymy. It’s
just that in some cultures teknonymy is practiced more formally and a parent is
renamed after the birth of the first child. There are many reasons for using
teknonymy. In some cultures, it’s considered taboo to call certain relations by
name (as in the usage example below). Sometimes, it’s convenience. You may not
know or remember the names of your child’s friends’ parents, for example, so you
resort to teknonymy.
USAGE: “Indeed, the taboo against using personal names is so strong,
and the urge to teknonymy so strong, that the child in question can be
imaginary. Sim cites with disapproval the example of a young housewife on a TV
gameshow being asked to introduce to the audience the gentleman standing beside
her. Her reply [meant] ‘This is my husband (the father of our
as-yet-unconceived child)’.”
Ho-min Sohn; Korean Language in Culture and Society; University
of Hawaii Press; 2006.
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